Get even by posting break-up details online

Kathleen Horan created relationshipobit.com where the broken hearted can post details of their failed love lives and exes

When Kathleen Horan's boyfriend walked out on her three years ago, she was heartbroken. She was in her mid-thirties, they had been living together for several years - this was the love of her life.

"It was like being punched in the stomach when you're not expecting it," she says. "I'd been through break-ups before, but I'd never felt this acute, intensive-care pain."

Two weeks later her father died. Horan, a reporter for New York's WNYC radio station, flew back to the family home in California where, surrounded by mementos of her father's life, she wrote an obituary for the local newspaper.

As she did so, some "cross-pollination" of the two emotional upheavals in her life took place: "I found writing cathartic and it occurred to me I should write an obituary for the love affair that had died, too."